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We Were Kittens Once, and Young

Townies is a series about life in New York, and occasionally other cities.

All of our cats are dying.

A few months ago, Rebecca’s passed away after a short illness. Then, a few weeks ago, Choire’s died after a long one.

As for me, well, I always assumed Frog would go first. Unlike his happy-go-lucky brother, Frog was the one who startled easily, who stared off into space with a melancholy and pridefulness that seemed to suggest the accumulated wisdom of generations. I decided early on, probably after finding him regarding me thoughtfully when I stumbled through the door drunk, that he was the more emotional and fragile of the two, although it’s possible I was projecting. (I was probably just projecting.)

Admittedly, I suffer from a grim personality quirk in which the joy of welcoming a pet into my home is immediately followed by grief in the knowledge that I’ll likely outlive it. But everything feels different this time around.

As a child, my pets (in total, four dogs and one cat) were convenient companions: Warm bodies to be paid attention to and loved and snuggled with in between soccer practices, play dates and tap dance recitals; living, breathing toys who could be counted on to engage in a game of chase or offer a wagging tail when I was in the mood, and to go away when I wasn’t. The real work they required — the care, the feeding, the early-morning walks, the doctor’s appointments — was left to the adults, and their eventual deaths felt oblique and unreal, the fatal cancers within them hidden well out of reach of both medical specialists and innocent eyes.

I adopted Frog and Toshi in 1996, after spotting them playing in the yard next to my Brooklyn walk-up. I made increasingly loud smooching sounds at them as I wiped the outside of the bathroom window, and soon, a young woman emerged from the apartment below.

“They’re the last two of the litter,” she called up to me. “I’ll be down in 5 minutes,” I said.

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Ping Zhu

Unlike dogs, whose wagging tails, endearing clumsiness and panting smiles are evolutionarily manipulative and endlessly entertaining, interpreting the narratives of a cat’s inner life takes extraordinary concentration, which makes the relationship all the more poignant. Mindfulness, I like to say, is what separates true cat lovers from the unenlightened. Without it, a cat is just a sleeping, eating, potential killing machine. With it, a cat is the most amazing of mammalian creations: A balletic, apex predator; a perfect package of physical economy and exquisite Darwinian design. (When someone tells me she doesn’t like cats, I assume she isn’t trying hard enough.)

But the focus they require and their intrinsic self-sufficiency is also what makes watching them die especially devastating: there is a heightened awareness not unlike the way the children of alcoholics or depressed people are said to monitor every move of a sick parent; every cough, every patch of dirty, matted fur and loss of balance is a shared indignity; to have to carry your friend to his food bowl or watch him pause to catch a breath before settling down into the soft nest of blankets you’ve lovingly constructed feels like a heartbreak like no other.

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For over a decade, my unconscious hours were dominated by a dream in which I found myself milling about on abandoned, dimly-lit subway platform. Frog and Toshi were there too, poking around at pieces of detritus on the tracks, chasing rodents and tearing up the wooden railway ties with vigor. Eventually, a faint rumble could be heard, and a piercing light would begin its inexorable creep along the station tiles, and I’d hurl myself onto to the trackbed to save them. No matter how the cats struggled, screeched or scratched, I never let go.

Any psychoanalyst worth her $115 hourly rate would conclude, correctly, that these dreams were subconscious expressions of my fears of losing whatever money, status and success I’d accrued. She’d be half right. A lot of them — most, actually — were about the cats themselves or, rather, their enduring, revelatory friendship and my pride in the fact that they were the one aspect of my life I could control. Like many New Yorkers in their 20s and 30s, I lived paycheck to paycheck and often ate badly, drank too much and didn’t get enough sleep. Jobs came and went, as did friends and lovers. My parents and sister lived far away. The cats were my constant.

But while they were my sanctuary from the city, in a weird way, they were also nagging reminders of what I hated most about it: perfect surrogates for the aspects of the New York personality — the flightiness, iciness, self-interestedness and overdeveloped sense of entitlement — that I found the most intolerable to bear. My indulgence of and obsession with their inconstancy was both masochistic and instructive.

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My dog was always there for me, and then I was there for her in her last days.

More worrying, having pets meant that I cared about something and, for a long time after my arrival in New York, I suspected that caring — or the appearance of caring — was a weakness, a vulnerability, an admission of need and therefore of fear. Sometimes I wondered what life would be like without them. That life, I figured, would involve a bigger bank account, glamorous travel and a succession of dark-haired, accented lovers. I’d run marathons, or climb mountains, or take off for the weekend to Paris or Belize. Maybe I’d turn that life into a best-selling memoir, which would in turn inspire a big-budget movie starring a toothsome actress like Julia Roberts, exotic locales and heaps of wine and pasta.

Adventuresses and power players, I assumed, didn’t have — or need — pets.

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Eventually, I got older, the crises in my personal life dwindled in number and severity, and I met and married a dark-haired, accented man whose love of the cats came to rival my own. The subway nightmare, which had plagued me for upward of a decade, abated somewhat. Save the cats’ aching knees and slowed metabolism, things were good. There was momentum, and tranquility, all at the same time.

But my once steadfast companions had started to slow. They slept more; they ate less, drank less and grew uninterested in even the most tasty of treats. Visits to the vet became more commonplace — the result of infections, blockages and a host of other minor ailments — and I invested in expensive pet insurance, daily doses of thyroid medication and special prescription food. As was the case with many of my friends in their mid-30s, it seemed a cruel joke that at a moment when my life was reaching a certain equilibrium my most faithful companions were beginning to falter.

Then, late last year, Toshi started wasting away. He had been a vigorous, perhaps emotional eater, the one of the pair who was always ready and willing for a fresh handful of kibble, and he had the paunch to prove it. Now, however, his haunches were looking frighteningly narrow, so I packed him in his soft carrier, called a car service and spirited him over the 59th Street Bridge to his vet on the Upper East Side. I took his brother too.

It is not an exaggeration to say that, when I imagine what their deaths will be like, the scene plays out like the highlight reel from an actress’ Oscar-nominated performance. I don’t know how I am going to live without you, I whisper. They look back at me blankly and then go slack as I hover over them with a whimper that becomes a howling, crushing wail usually reserved for the loss of a child or a lover; a sort of base, primal grief that rattles you to your bones and frightens everyone in the room. It frightens me too — not just the fantasy but the present-day reality, a heaving that begins low in my abdomen and thunders slowly upward every time I catch a glimpse of a well-worn paw or brush the back of my hand over a soft underbelly. I feel it when I see them sleeping, their beautifully composed tight, little spirals of fur and ears and legs and tails; I feel it when I hear them moving, softly clacking up and down the apartment hallway or ker-thumping from the bed to the floor and back up again.

It feels crazy.

They’re just cats, after all.

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Just cats. The vet looked vaguely sympathetic, but not surprised. I sort of hated him for it. An ultrasound showed that one of Toshi’s kidneys had atrophied and was essentially deceased. The other was enlarged, taking on the work of its dearly departed twin, and, as such, was incredibly stressed. Eventually, the vet said, it would fail. Within the year, probably. He seemed unmoved by the tears falling down my face.

Toshi sat obligingly, sanguine except for a paw gripping the side of the steel examining table. I held him as the vet arranged his hind legs underneath him. “Such a good cat,” trilled one of the veterinary technicians as she helped to extract a urine sample. “One of the nicest I’ve ever met,” said another. Frog was quiet in the other carrier.

I asked about kidney transplants. They were possible, said the vet, but they required a slew of tests, surgery that ran into the tens of thousands of dollars and the adoption of the feline donor who, presumably, had been raised for that very purpose.

I thought about it for a moment, said no thank you, and set off for home. Frog sat next to me in the taxi; Toshi was in my lap. I had the urge to pull him up out of his carrier and bury my entire being in his fur. There was a chance that the trauma of the vet visit and the sounds and sights of the cab careening up First Avenue would cause him to wriggle loose from my arms and run amok in the car. There was also a chance that I was going to scare the cab driver. There was also a chance that I’d never let him go. He peeked at me through the mesh of the carrier and blinked at me emphatically. By the time we got home, he was sound asleep.

Anna Holmes is a writer and the creator of the Web site Jezebel.

What's Next

Townies, a series about life in New York — and occasionally other cities — written by the novelists, journalists and essayists who live there, appears on Thursdays. This week features an essay by Sandy SooHoo, a freelance photographer and writer who is working on a collection of essays.